© 2021 Brenda Sparks Prescott
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
978-1-949290-53-0 paperback
Cover Design
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Monkey C Media
Bink Books
a division of
Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company
Fairfield, California
http://www.bedazzledink.com
Dedication
For my nuclear family: Arnold, Mae, and Anthony Sparks
Acknowledgements
Much respect to Joan Conner, Elizabeth Searle, and all of the teachers and mentors who helped breathe life into the beginnings of this project. A special tip o’ the hat to Dennis Lehane for yang and for attention to plotting. Blessings to Eunice Scarfe, leader of The Blank Page workshop, where the first words of this story emerged. Many, many thanks to the editors of the journals in which stories and characters from this book appeared in different forms: The Louisville Review, “Nuclear Family,” and The Crab Orchard Review, “The Messenger or Woman Waving to the Future.” Boundless praise for the folks at Bedazzled Ink Publishing and Smith Publicity, who invited this book out into the wide world.
Deep gratitude to Paul Zernicke and Kelly Hahn for championing my writing. Much love to this book’s wise and magical godmothers: Tanya Whiton, Lee Hope, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Anne Britting Oleson, Rebecca Bearden Welsh, the late Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo, Lynn Gonsalves, Mary Archambault, Betsy Smith, and Julia Parrillo. And eternal adoration for Jim, “my knight in shiny armor.”
Table of Contents
Appointment with Mrs. H.
Lola: The Discretion of the Monteros
Lola: The Discretion of the Monteros 2
Appointment with Mrs. H. 2
Chita: The Discretion of the Monteros: 3
Appointment with Mrs. H. 3
Appointment with Mrs. H. 4
Chita: The Discretion of the Monteros 4
Woman Waving to the Future 1
The Man with the Spanish Shoes 1
The Pattern Man 1
The Pattern Man 2
The Man with the Spanish Shoes 2
The Pattern Man 3
The Pattern Man 4
The Man with the Spanish Shoes 3
Lonnie Takes It to the Bridge 1
Chita: A Message from García 1
Lonnie Takes it to the Bridge 2
Lola: The Discretion of the Monteros 5
A Glass Swan 1
A Glass Swan 2
Chita: A Message from García 2
A Glass Swan 3
Chita: A Message from García 3
A Glass Swan 4
Chita: A Message from García 4
Chita: A Message from García 5
Woman Waving to the Future 2
Chita: A Message from García 6
Woman Waving to the Future 3
Chita: A Message from García 7
Reprise: The Man with the Spanish Shoes
Chita: A Message from García 8
Woman Waving to the Future 4
Woman Waving to the Future 5
Break: Back in the U.S.S.R.
Lola: Gathering Time 1
Ramón: Gathering Time 2
Chita: Gathering Time 3
Woman Waving to the Future 6
Mutually Assured Destruction 1
Appointment with Mrs. H. 5
Mutually Assured Destruction 2
We all died during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All of this is just an after-image.
—Dennis Nurske
Appointment with Mrs. H. 1
BETTY ANN JOHNSON was alone. Her two assistants wouldn’t arrive at the dressmaking studio until eight. That’s what she called it—her studio—although it was really just a large, open room over Paul’s Vacuums in a plaza in Silver Spring. In other shops, fluorescent lights tinged the room green and errant pins stuck up from dingy, threadbare carpet. That was not Betty Ann’s style. Rather than keep a dismal workroom, she had run her business from closets in her homes on Air Force posts and had saved every nickel until she could afford to open a nice studio.
She pulled an aqua Princess phone within reach, lined up a tablet of pink paper beside it, and settled on her stool. She expected the unexpected call. Tons of supplies, munitions, and personnel moved through the Maryland Air Force base where Ray, her husband, was stationed. Although the installation was undergoing rapid expansion, the current activity level outstripped its usual frenetic pace. The military does plenty of senseless things, but not at that scale. Something was up. She had to be alert.
Ray had already called earlier that morning to tell her that he was working a double shift again. It was his third in a week. When the order came to shrink the time for mandatory flight readiness down to only one hour, the wives knew something was up but the guys weren’t talking. That was the disturbing part of carrying on as usual: the wives were on the inside, knew details civilians never heard about, but when the men wouldn’t, couldn’t tell, it was time to worry. However, Betty Ann had rules. Never worry until you know what to worry about. That was a hard one to keep, with the wall in Berlin, Castro in Cuba, missiles in Turkey, and rockets in space.
The newspapers talked about nukes and A-bombs in the abstract—how many they had, how many we had—even as American school children drilled for an emergency in the vain hope that a nuclear strike might be survivable. All of that was well and good for civilians. Her husband loaded nuclear weapons onto planes. Her son’s ship was probably carrying them also. If she knew all of that, someone on the other side did also, making her home base and her son’s berth big, fat targets. Fussing with pleats and sewing hidden hems seemed ludicrous when she thought like that, so she tried not to.
Clouds of taffeta and silk floated from racks of half-finished gowns for upcoming balls. Most of her clients were well-to-do Negroes who attended the Harvest Moon Ball put on by the black Shriners. She had a growing following, though, among white women who wanted more style than a department store could offer and who liked Betty Ann’s reasonable prices. She kept the patterns for their gowns segregated so she could assure them that when they appeared at the Harvest Ball, no colored woman would be wearing the same dress to the Harvest Moon Ball. What she didn’t tell them was that her best creations always danced with her Negro clients.
Betty Ann inspected every stitch sewed in her studio. At the end of the previous night, her assistants had left a green taffeta and a white satin on her worktable. Most of Mimi’s green taffeta was fine; Betty Ann found fault only in the ruche at the back of the waist. She pinned a small square of red cloth to the spot and turned to the white satin. Terry’s stitching was more problematic, as she was more likely to rush. When the hour got late and the hand and eye tired, the brain reasoned that good was good enough. Betty Ann understood, but she had her standards. The zipper would have to be redone. She shook her head as she wrote “zipper” on a piece of pink paper. She pinned the note to the offending spot and returned the gowns to her assistants’ stations.
The extra worktables for her assistants, along with a serger, a steamer, a counter with a small sink, and a miniscule bathroom, made up the work area at the end of the studio furthest from the door. Ray knew a carpet layer who had patiently assembled remnants of steel gray Berber carpeting that didn’t show dirt. The pearl gray walls echoed the color of a Manhattan showroom she had studied during a visit to Ray’s family. The work area could be hidden by curtains that hung from ceiling to floor. Betty Ann had made them from a coral-and-salmon striped sateen she had bought on the same trip to New York. The smooth fabric ha
d cost more than the nubs of carpeting did, but the stylish curtains lent polish to the atelier. That’s what Betty Ann really called her studio, but only to herself.
Despite the seasonal jump in work, the women kept the studio clean by tidying up at the end of each day, no matter how tired they were. Betty Ann was strict with that routine, keeping it up herself as an example, and her assistants usually stayed in line with her. Even so, Betty Ann found an Ebony magazine on Terry’s chair and returned it to the coffee table on the showroom side. Two years earlier, as 1960 headed for the World Series and its own late innings, Ray had balked at missing a late-season game to buy furniture for her studio. Despite his reluctance, though, she had gotten the pink Naugahyde and black wrought iron love seats. Then she bought the coffee table and two matching side tables from an Air Force family that had been reassigned to Japan. Ray tiled them in black, pink, and gray. Soon her lounge area, accessorized with Good Housekeeping and Jet, aqua pillows, and the aqua Princess phone with its long cord, became the nexus of a certain Negro feminine society.
After filling the percolator with water and plugging it in, Betty Ann sat at her work table in the center of the studio. An emergency repair, the fallen hem of a black wool skirt, lay in front of her. It would have to be done by hand. She decided to get it out of the way before plunging back into the froth of the ball gowns. She usually wouldn’t take a routine job like the black skirt during the season of fetes and balls, but it was for Mrs. Dupont, who always paid extra. Betty Ann made an exception for her. Exceptions were good for business. Exceptions were good for life.
She had no illusions. She had grown up outside a town in Southern Illinois that was so small, folks driving south on Route 3 from Murphysboro toward Kentucky didn’t notice the clapboard church and the few other buildings that reluctantly huddled down the cross road to their left. Even the outbuildings on the farms looked like strangers that had been forced into close quarters and were trying their damnedest not to touch. She knew that the Negroes in Washington who could trace their ancestry on both sides of the color line back to the 1600s could smell the dark loam settled deep in her soul. When she slipped and said “ambalance” or “su-supposed,” she saw the slight flaring of the nostrils and the barely noticeable uptick of the head. Still, they came to her.
If they wanted to pretend that no one in their family tree ever picked cotton, she let them. She just charged a little more. Once, Mrs. Dupont, the owner of the skirt she was hemming and a light-skinned lady who insisted she was allergic to the sun, discovered that her neighbor paid less than she did for a suit. Betty Ann immediately offered her the same discount, saying, “Of course, for that price, you get German-inspired design, not French. It’s just as good, though.” She reached over to Mrs. Dupont and smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle out of her collar. “No one can tell the difference. Mrs. Kennedy, maybe. Surely, though, it won’t matter to you.” Not only did Mrs. Dupont refuse the discount, she told all her snooty friends to request “the French cut.” Their reach for exclusivity was A-okay with Betty Ann.
The Princess phone rang.
Betty Ann lay down the wool skirt. The call couldn’t be one of her regular customers; they didn’t phone before nine. Ray maybe, with a request goofy enough that her heartbeat could slow and she could let exasperation creep into her voice. The phone rang again. Or perhaps it was Lonnie, her oldest, the one in the Navy, on the Princeton somewhere in the Pacific (he had been vague about his whereabouts in his last several letters). Perhaps he had swapped a bottle of illicit Scotch for a phone patch-through to the States. The phone rang a third time as she opened the drawer of the worktable and pulled out a man’s gold ring. On its face was an eagle etched in onyx. She closed her fist around the ring and picked up the phone.
“Sonia has broken her wrist.” The soft words began without introduction. “Bowling.” The Southern accent and obvious frustration drew the word out long past its natural life.
“Bowling, Mrs. Hepplewhite?” Betty Ann’s voice was light and clear, but the circle of the ring dented the flesh of her clenched fist. She was almost a hundred percent sure who her caller was, but if it were not the wife of the famous Brigadier General Harold “Happy” Hepplewhite, the speaker would be flattered by the mistake. Nicki Hepplewhite had a distinctive, melodious voice, familiar from her many appearances at base functions, but until now, she had never spoken directly to this particular wife. Not once.
The general’s wife wasn’t in the habit of calling NCO wives at seven thirty in the morning, unless, of course, they worked for her. Betty Ann didn’t. She didn’t even work on base, not since she had moved her dressmaking business closer to the Negro trade. She didn’t consider the earliness of the call odd, the way a real civilian would. The military started before dawn and those married to it did too.
“I would not dare to bother you if this unfortunate accident had not put me in a completely desperate situation.”
“Ma’am?” Betty Ann cradled the receiver with her shoulder. She dropped the ring into her pocket and picked up the black wool skirt. Her hands were steady as she worked the needle.
Mrs. H. was the Jackie Kennedy of the Maryland Air Force set, and the wives of the airmen religiously followed her Southern interpretation of the First Lady’s style. Sonia K., her dressmaker, had ambition, a mutable background, and a facility with accents. Her designs flattered Mrs. H. with a natural sophistication.
“Sonia’s arm will be in one of those huge, ugly plaster casts for weeks. Why can’t they make them more modest? Anyway, that leaves me without a new dress for our invitation in two weeks.” She assumed that the world knew about an upcoming dinner with the Kennedys. In this case, the world did know. Success at the White House would mean additional commands assigned to the base and maybe even another star for the General’s shoulder. Betty Ann made it her business to know such things.
She snipped the black thread of the hem. “What may I do for you?”
“Honey, Sonia says you’re the only one north of Atlanta that she’d trust. We’ve changed the design so much that the right pattern’s not even cut yet. Think of coming here as a personal favor to me.”
Betty Ann swept a look over the racks of her own colorful creations. “I can’t possibly leave the studio with all the gowns to finish for the balls.”
“Is it the money? I swear you people will bleed me dry.”
Betty Ann’s hands stopped checking the skirt’s seams for breaks. What people was she referring to, exactly?
After a pause Mrs. H. said, “I’ll pay you double your normal rate.”
Most services were available at the right price, but a major hurdle loomed that money alone might not clear. This was the first time Mrs. H. had spoken to Betty Ann directly, but it wasn’t their first meeting. That was just a few weeks before and had involved the owner of the ring in her pocket. The encounter had gone poorly. If Mrs. H. made the association, her surefire drive to engage Betty Ann might evaporate or turn vindictive. Betty Ann’s casting as a generic Negress at their first meeting had humiliated her. Now the namelessness presented a grand opportunity, but accepting this commission posed a huge risk.
“You’re very generous,” she said, “but I was here until midnight last night, and probably will be again tonight with my existing orders.”
“Then we’ll come to your studio.”
Betty Ann sewed for several white women, but none came to the studio. She speared white thread through the eye of the needle and started to reinforce the overstitching on the skirt pocket.
“This is a Negro shop,” she said. She appreciated the quality of the silence that followed. Good. Now they were both uncomfortable.
Mrs. H. sighed and said, “Any other circumstances I should be aware of?”
Betty Ann could think of plenty. “No, ma’am.”
“Then when will you be free?”
“Three thirty?”
“Three thirty it is.” Mrs. Hepplewhite hung up.
Betty Ann jumped up
and shook the receiver like a maraca. Its long cord waved underneath. “All right, Mrs. H.,” she said, swaying her hips to her own beat. This business exception could prove deadly, her trespass too fresh to go without notice by the eagle-eyed Mrs. H. Yet. A dress worn to a White House dinner. The recognition? That would be worth the risk.
Lola
The Discretion of the Monteros 1
I AM THE sister that makes the food. I am the practical one. I have a small café named Dolores, after me, although everyone calls me Lola. It is near Plaza Valdés, not far down Calle Santa Monica. Most women in our old set would not have run a café, much less cook in their own homes, but I am a Montero, and our heritage shows no matter what we do. We have Catalonian blood from both sides. Yes, but you’re showing your Versailles roots, those silly women would chide, as if that were not as good as being from old Matanzas. No matter.
We were not afraid of work and remembered well that Abuelo started in a small shack on a deserted beach. Although Mami came with more blood and money than Papi, she did not believe that women should be useless. She made sure all three of us girls learned to cook on our large stove at home. A lady needed to know how to make meals that please a man, she insisted, even if the lady is not expected to do more than supervise their preparation.
At first Chita, our middle sister, scolded me for pursuing what she called a common course. She taunted me with the venerated name of Lola Cruz, saying I was bringing shame to that gracious first lady of Matanzas (who Mami said I was named after). Then one morning, while we were drinking delicious Cubano coffee in the courtyard of our family home, Rosita, née Rosalba and our oldest, pointed out that I did what I wanted when I went to Havana with money that my José knew nothing about. That shut up Chita for a while.
What freedom my café brought. Soon my sisters wanted some too. Rosita set up a sewing room to make dresses in the back of her house. She used to be taken in private cars to Havana to fit the latest fashions on ladies who imported bolts of fabric from Paris and Madrid. Of course, due to the circumstances of the Revolution, most of her patrons went across the water. She stayed in town and let out seams and altered sleeve lengths or, on rare occasions, went to Havana about a dress to be made from a cherished piece of European cloth.
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